YOU may remember Nicole Eggert bounding in slo-mo across the beach in a trademark red bathing suit in the TV series Baywatch.
We're a long way from the beach. This is Winnipeg in December. But it's only mildly taxing to reconcile that iconic lifeguard image with the diminutive five-foot-two powerhouse now expertly manoeuvring a soccer ball past a young co-star in the halls of Churchill High School during an early evening lunch break near the Riverview set of her upcoming TV movie.
Even clad in low-riding jeans and a turtleneck sweater, the beach girl is still present in blond streaks and the tan.
At 34, Eggert is still precisely the kind of entity the Beach Boys wished all girls could be.
Born in Glendale and currently residing in Los Angeles, she is a true California Girl, an identity that was effectively set in sun-kissed bronze when she took the role of the aptly-named Summer Quinn in Baywatch from 1992 to 1994.
Eggert has been in Winnipeg the past few weeks playing the double role of a woman who gets to see what her life would have been like if she had not married her high school sweetheart in the Lifetime TV movie tentatively titled A Christmas Wish.
A distaff variation of It's a Wonderful Life, Eggert plays two characters in one: a middle-class housewife frustrated by the everyday hassles of family life, and, in an alternate reality, the same woman who seemingly has it all after she marries the wealthier man of her dreams.
I catch Eggert just after her dinner break and remind her of a story she once told about the set of Baywatch, which offered especially lavish craft services. It was torture, Eggert had said, because she had been contractually obligated to keep her weight within five pounds of a 105-pound limit.
"It was hard," she says after enjoying a healthy dinner. "I actually gained a lot of weight here. I think it's my body trying to keep itself warm, but my character is not supposed to be (skinny). She's a middle-class mom, straight out of high school has two kids and is kind of depressed. So I'm a little bit meatier."
I feel obliged to offer something of an apology to Eggert, because when I first reported that she was coming to shoot a movie here, I referred to her as a "former Baywatch babe." No actor likes to be pigeonholed for one specific role, so I ask her if the Baywatch thing hasn't gotten old for her.
"Yes and no," she says. "On the one hand, it bothered me. I had been working my whole life. I worked with big directors. (Her first movie role -- at the age of eight -- was in the movie Rich and Famous under the direction of no less than George Cukor.)
"When I was hired to do this television series, all of a sudden, I had this stigma," she says.
"I get a little defensive of it because I feel like when people say it, they say it as sort of an insult. But really, it's not. Because Baywatch was the number one TV show in the world, so it still holds that record, so say what you want, how can you compete with the number one?
"So, you know, I think that can hit as hard as you allow. I'm actually quite proud of it because I love who I am inside and I'm happy with that and then on top of it, I got to be called a 'Baywatch babe' when those weren't easy shoes to fill."
She may have meant to say bathing suit. She acknowledges: "On Baywatch, you were hired on a purely physical basis."
But she doesn't have a problem with that.
"The other things I do are based on ability, so for me, I guess it's the best of both worlds, and it's like icing on the sundae," she says. "I got to play a part where they hired beautiful women with their clothes off. You can't just be a beautiful face, the whole physical thing had to be going on. That was sort of a plus. That didn't hurt."
A Christmas Wish is scheduled to wrap production today.
* * *
As we reported earlier this week, Dennis Quaid and Ziyi Zhang will be coming to Winnipeg next month to film the thriller The Horsemen. But it's not the only Manitoba-bound serial killer thriller setting up for this winter.
Another film, titled Whiteout, will also be shooting in the next two months. The film is set in the Antarctic at the dusk of a months-long night. If all goes as planned, it will be shooting on Lake Winnipeg near Gimli, where the filmmakers hope to be able to rotate cameras 360 degrees to capture authentic Antarctic desolation.
No word on whether penguins will be necessary for the shoot. No human stars have been attached yet either.
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca
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